STILL HERE: Loyal fans sit in the rain as they watch Robinson Cano at bat during the fourth inning of the Yankees' 5-3 win over the Orioles at the Stadium. Photo: Paul J. Bereswill

It is 11:45 at night, and it is pouring. It is actually a Forrest Gump-style sideways rain, with small stinging rain, and it is flying under the overhang of Section 123 at Yankee Stadium, and it is invading the one dry spot that Freddie Palmeiri thought he had found.

“No matter what,” he says, “it’s going to find you.”

Palmeiri’s boss didn’t know it yet (though presumably she does now), but he is calling in sick in the morning, even if he isn’t really sick (though after enduring five hours — and counting — in the rain, that’s still very much a possibility).

“Oh, she went home a few hours ago,” he says. “She hadn’t seen it, and now she had, and she was tired of getting soaked. Our seats started out way up top. We sat in them for about 10 minutes and she said, ‘I’m going home. You can stay.’ ”

So Freddie had options. He opted to stay.

“If they’re playin’,” he says, twisting an old Garry Templeton saying on its ear, “I’m stayin’.”

Logic plays no part in anything on a night like this, of course. The Yankees and the Orioles are scheduled to play a baseball game beginning at 7:05 p.m., but by 7:05 p.m. the map on weather.com looks like something out of a Jackson Pollock nightmare, green blobs and greener blobs and some yellow stuff that doesn’t look so promising. By 8:05, it is worse. And by 9:05 you wonder when Jim Cantore is going to show up with an umbrella, a rain smock and a grave look of deep concern on his face.

Yet by 10:05 the game has still not been cancelled. They are playing in Washington. They are playing in Pittsburgh. They are playing in Philadelphia. This late in the season, the fates of ballgames in bad weather are out of the hands of the home teams, in the hands of umpires and major league baseball.

And those hands clearly don’t want to think about bringing doubleheaders en masse to the Northeast Corridor today. So as the rain lessens and slackens and threatens to leave — only to come back in comically thick sheets before retreating again — a decision has clearly been made.

These games are going to be played.

Come hell or . . . well, you know.

“To me, it was clear once it gets to 9:30, 10 o’clock, they haven’t called the game yet, they aren’t going to call it at all,” says Mike Plattsky, who’s sitting a few rows to the left of Palmeiri and who isn’t taking any chances, wrapped in a clear plastic umbrella, same as he’s been since he walked in the door 5 ½ hours ago. “So I figured, I’m here. What’s a few more hours?”

It is not an opinion shared by all that many. By midnight, which also happens to be the top of the fourth inning, there are, by the direct count of The Post’s Tim Bontemps, precisely 2,179 people on hand, which is to say 42,394 fewer fans than the amount that will be announced a little later on.

In Washington, where Stephen Strasberg makes a triumphant comeback from Tommy John surgery, Nationals Ballpark is well less than half full. Even in Philly, where sellouts are the norm, it looks like a stadium shot of Shea Stadium circa 1980.

And still they play on.

In 2011, maybe fans should know better. Maybe part of the implied contract when you purchase a ticket is that you are expected to perform an array of services in exchange for your $25, or $100, or $500. You must buy $10 beers. You must buy $12 hamburgers. And you must be ready to either sit through absurdly long rain delays or stay away and use your unused tickets as birdcage liner (though, as the Yankees are good about doing, they offer a rain check for a grandstand seat next year, even if you stay home).

And here’s the kick: You can’t even blame your team. You have to blame your sport. MLB held all the cards last night.

They literally soaked you.

“I’m glad I stayed,” Freddie Palmeiri says, and by 2:15 in the morning, he will have seen the Yankees win a sloppy, sloggy, slapsticky 5-3 game from the Orioles.